1 Checklists & templates

For the last couple of years, mainly after reading the books Atomic Habits and Checklist Manifesto, I’ve used templates based checklists, such lists can change habits, behaviors, and of course avoid mistakes.

As an example of the latter, imagine you are on a trip/vacation and realize you forgot to pack some item your favorite sunglasses, phone charger, or something else. What action can you take to avoid this?

By maintaining a trip packing checklist you can add the missing item to this list and be confident that you will not forget it again.

For the behavior change part, I’ve add actions such as read an article/chapter when I wanted to read more, and added plan exercise to my weekly review checklist to help me exercise more. Each day I would invoke my daily checklist template and run through it over the course of the day.

1.1 Enter daily themes

As the current daily checklist has grown, and grown it’s become harder to consistently complete it. I take this a sign that the checklist has worked and more actions just kept creeping in.

To solve this creep I’ve instead split it out to a base checklist with core actions such as Clean unread emails that should be completed every day and a variety of themed checklist. My current themes are:

Health: Exercise, relax, and sleep well.
Project: Work on a side project, build something fun.
Learning: Learn something new.
Social: Connect with friends and family.
Admin: Handle laundry, emails, and other administrative tasks/chores.

To my weekly review checklist, I’ve added a task to plan the themes for the upcoming week. Not every theme gets a day, I might not have an admin day every week, opting instead for an extra project/health day and two social days over the weekend.

1.2 Setting up the tech for checklists

I’ve set up a system that can manage the checklists templates and handle the logic of choosing which theme to invoke. It can also execute side effects I.e logging the choice of template to a sheet etc. The requirements for the tech stack are:

I should be able to easily active the template from anywhere.
- This means that I should be able to activate it from at least my phone, if it required access to my mac that would suck. It would also be nice if I was still able to active it from my mac, iPad, etc. So I don’t need to get out my phone if I’m already at my mac.
It should be easy to update templates and add new ones.
It should be stable and require as little maintenance as possible.

Given the above requirements, there obvious choice for orchestrating the actions fell on The Shortcuts app for apple’s platforms. This allows me to activate the template from any of my devices, meeting the first requirement.

I did consider making my own backend in Haskell/Rust and getting the templates via an API call from shortcuts. While this could be super fun project, it would require more maintenance than I would like, having to run a server and keep code up to date.

Instead I’ll manage templates via a folder in ICloud Drive, since the templates are plain text in task paper format I can update from all my devices, and it will be easy to move somewhere else if I ever want to.

A problem I found after setting this up is that the shortcut “Get File” action fails if the file is not downloaded from ICloud drive. This is super annoying as the fix is to open the files app, find the folder, click download and run the action again. I hope this get’s fixed by running the shortcut often enough that iCloud drives never decides to offload it from local to remote storage. For now I’ve moved all file reading to the top of the script to ensure it side effects are only run if all files are present

1.2.1 Log of all themes

Only activating a checklist would be fine if all i wanted was a prompt asking which theme I want. I prefer setting all the weeks themes in my calendar and having the system pick the right one. To achieve this I’ve created a new calender delegation called daily themes and added all day events with a selected theme for each day. This works amazingly well with the calendar sets of fantastical. This means I can use my calendar as a way to select themes.

I’ve also created a sheet in apple numbers to log which theme was selected and when it was completed. This enabled me to see distrution of themes over time and if I’m completing the themes I’ve set.

1.3 The daily checklist script

The actions performed by the script are:

Invoke the base checklist
Check if my work calendar has any events and if so invoke the work checklist
Get theme from calendar, if no theme is set, ask for one and set it in the calendar
Invoke the theme checklist

A shortcut that performs the above actions can seen in figure Figure 1.